Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Serving Together: Building the Family Bond

Continuing with our focus on serving this week, let's take time to think about how our family bond can be made stronger as we serve together.

Here are some things to keep in mind during your family service project.

Build Your Relationships: Serving together is an ideal time to get to know each other better. Take note of what different family members do well. Intentionally encourage them and tell them you are proud of how they demonstrated a great attitude or area of strength.

Here are some things to do afterwards to get the most out of your experience.

Talk About It: Take time right after you finish serving to talk about your family volunteer experiences. By reflecting and talking about it, the experience will have a greater impact and allow family members to share what really meant a lot to them, moved or challenged them. This is a great way to get to know each other better.

Discussion Questions: The following questions may be helpful to guide conversations when you finish your time of serving together.

What? What kind of difference did we make together? Allow each member to share any stories about the experience. They can be sad, silly, frustrating, funny, serious or touching stories.

Why? Why was it important to do this project together as a family? How did it fit with the values and beliefs that are important to our family? How did it impact you?

Now what? Is there anything that we will do differently as a family as a result of our time serving together? How did it impact our entire family? What kinds of activities do we want to do in the future?

Pray for Those Served: Take a few minutes to pray as a family asking God to bless those you served by using your act of service to bring hope, healing and grace into their lives.

Team up with us as we deliver food to 3,000 Lansing families in need on Sunday, February 21st. For details, click here!

A few weeks ago, my girls and I danced the hula at a retirement home. The girls loved serving treats to everyone and it was neat to see them "light up" at the thought of doing something nice for someone else. It sparked conversations about why people are in wheel chairs, have tubes in their mouths, etc. They said, "We have so many grandma's now!" Yes, spontaneous conversations are incredibly meaningful!